More than a mere RHEL release testbed

Comment Red Hat is the biggest – and one of the oldest – companies in the Linux world, but despite the difficulty of accurately measuring Linux usage figures, Ubuntu and its relatives seem to be the most popular Linux distributions. Red Hat isn’t sitting idle, though. Despite its focus on enterprise software, including virtualisation, storage and Java tools, it’s still aggressively developing its family of distros: RHEL, CentOS and Fedora.…

Learn how in Automic Webinar

Promo Definition: Continuous delivery (CD) is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time.[1] It aims at building, testing, and releasing software faster and more frequently. The approach helps reduce the cost, time, and risk of delivering changes by allowing for more incremental updates to applications in production. A straightforward and repeatable deployment process is important for continuous delivery.…

Best part of update is taste of much-promised GNOME beauty

Canonical's Ubuntu 16.10, codenamed "Yakkety Yak", is nowhere near as chunky an update as 16.04 LTS was earlier this year. But that doesn't mean there's nothing new. In fact, the firm's second release of the year has quite a few fresh features to hold users over until the bright and shiny future of Unity 8 and Mir arrive some time next year.…

Oooo, oooo, that smell…

Of all the agile practices out there, “pair programming” is the one that elicits the most heckles, confusion, and head-scratching. The idea is that rather than having one person sitting at a screen, coding, you have two who program together. Those who practice it speak of it like most people do of their first time at Burning Man, while those who have never had the “experience” just can’t see what the big deal is.…

Looking for lessons for FOSS from OX

OX Summit Back in the dot com heyday, around 1999 and 2000, Linux and open source conferences were huge events: they were packed and brimming with excitement. There was optimism, new initiatives in every conceivable direction, and anything seemed possible. Move over, Grandad: everything traditional was going to be up-ended by open source.…

Fuzzing tool used to test Chrome lands on GitHub

For a while now, Google's Chrome team has had a fuzzing tool to help them find bugs in the browser before bounty hunters do. Now, Mountain View has decided the same techniques can be applied to open source software in general.…

Pick a partner, eat the Nougat, feel the love

Analysis There was a distinct whiff of the retro about Google’s launch of its Pixel smartphone. Exclusives with selected large mobile operators; yet another attempt to create a unified Android experience; even the clear focus on Apple as the primary competition – all these should be issues of the past.…

The React/Node platform makes Walmart's website sing

@WalmartLabs – which practices deviant punctuation and develops software for the retail giant that bears its name – on Monday released Electrode, an open-source platform for building universal React/Node applications.…

Sentiment analysis might just be useful

Comment At Google's Horizon cloud event in San Francisco on Tuesday, the ad giant demonstrated its Cloud Vision API through what it called the GCP Emotobooth. Less of a booth than a corner of a room covered by a connected camera, the experience combined all the forced fun of making faces on demand with the dubious pleasure of having one's mind read by a machine.…

Machine-learning boffins debate making software human

Machine communication is an area generating much excitement in AI. The ability to give machines a voice and personality has been the subject of many sci-fi films, and the push in natural language processing has brought that idea closer to reality.…

Choose a tech category, or go for the big one

Getting hot and sweaty at a London IoT shindig

Thingmonk “In education technology one thing I’d love to see is … making sure every coding club in this country offers hardware as a topic,” said Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, giving the opening talk at yesterday’s Thingmonk Internet of Things conference in London’s Old Street district.…

At least he didn't use Excel as a database for credit cards

We shouldn't encourage readers to waste their time like this, but it's the kind blend of wonderful insanity that springs from a sysadmin with time on his hands: an enterprise instant messaging platform that runs in Excel.…

Arduino-fiddling kids, and the rest of us, owe Papert a debt of gratitude

Back when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and I was a kid, I received the gift of a "100-in-1 Electronics Kit" that taught me the basics of electrical circuit design as I strung pre-cut wires between springy posts. At the very centre of this kit - its beating heart - a single transistor could be wired to work in an amplifier, or AM radio, or tone generator.…